began pimping Kayla three days after our wedding, mainly to pay for our honeymoon in Vegas. That’s where we got married, as well, and being in Nevada at the time, broke thanks to a terrible losing streak, well…it just seemed so natural.

She didn’t necessarily mind, either. She’d done it before—it’s how I met her—and she planned to use her body as a resource as long as she had something worth exploiting.

And Jesus, did Kayla ever have a body to exploit. Looking at her, nobody ever suspected that she had barely gotten a driver’s license and still couldn’t buy cigarettes. Even I had assumed her much older, although I loved her even more after the truth came out. Everything seemed so fresh, like spring lilacs in a field. When I saw her naked, it reminded me of those flowers, waving stiff in a mountain breeze, each delicate petal dancing independently.

Hearing her constant talk of dreams and lofty aspirations hurtled me back to my distant high school days, when the world seemed so unwieldy, yet so promising. I could see she experienced the same frustrations I did, some twenty years previous, and I wanted to help her escape everything that trapped her.

Oh, her life, her cruel, cruel life. Abused as a small girl, then kicked out by her father before she even hit puberty. Forced to run errands for drug dealers until she developed enough to have a chance at the upper echelon of the underworld, a position reached only by high-class call girls and domineering drug dealers.

I wanted to save her, somehow. “I could give you so much,” I’d told her during our first night together. “I’ve got connections.”

“Anything would be better than this,” she’d said. “Most girls my age are barely old enough to hurt, yet somehow I’m numb to the worst kind of pain.”

“What’s that?”

“Love,” she said. “I don’t ache from a lack of it, nor am I sore from losing it.”

“Would you like to fall in love?”

“People fall in love with me everyday. It’s part of my job. I give them sex, and they make it love. They throw their money at me because of that love, and end up with nothing more than the pennies I throw back at them. If falling in love means that I get reduced to pennies, than I don’t ever want to fall in love.”

 

he pimping only seemed natural, once you considered her assets—which did include her body, a minor consideration for success in a profession that thrived on desperation and escape. Kayla had a spell to cast over men, something which encouraged repeat customers. I’d experienced it myself, during my first few visits. Whether it was her lightly blushed face, her casual green eyes, or her bouncing walk...she had something shrouded her in the illusion of innocence. Her demeanor suggested that she saw the whole world as a possible conquest, and that nothing could stop her. That childish enthusiasm, the essence of hope, made her seem so delicately naive.

She could almost taste the promise of the good life she thought owed to her, and she knew what tools she possessed to make that fleeting taste a reality. What she lacked, or so she thought, was a vehicle.

Then she met me, and decided I would provide that vehicle. After all, I had worn an air of wealth and stability, the two things which would allow her to run without reason and endlessly pursue that conquest. Also two things which I lacked or feared, and only role-played as a way of escape.

So she married me. Following the honeymoon, I told her the truth.

“I have nothing,” I said, “not even pennies, to my name.”

She laughed.

“I mean it. We need you to go back to work.”

“That’s all right, Isaac. I love you, and if that’s what love requires, then I’ll go.”

So she went to work again, spending her days sleeping under my watchful eye and her nights with customers. She made good money, too, and soon we had enough to leave Vegas and its empty neon dreams for the desolate truth of Nevada’s desert.

 

hree months later she received a promotion to work weekends at her House. Although no longer her pimp, I continued to keep careful tabs on her business dealings within the whore house. This normally meant nothing more than an occasional visit to the House Mother, a marvelously made-up woman who enjoyed extravagant dresses and continually escalating prices.

“They like Kayla,” the Mother said loudly as she poured me a glass of beer during one of the negotiations. “She has very innocent qualities.” She handed me the icy glass, then continued. “Most of the customers want their hooker to remind them of the wife they left at home or the woman they hope to marry. They want a woman who won’t object to an hour or two of pool, some dirty jokes, and then sex. Kayla won’t do that. She has so many ideas of where her life should lead that she won’t stand for wasting time. She has an addictive optimism, a kind of pathetic hope that creates a tornado of energy everywhere she goes. Guys like that. It’s that innocent energy which gets Kayla so many return customers.”

I, too, had experienced that tornado, as well as its inevitable fade soon after our wedding. When she married me, I saw her settle for the first time in her life. Instead of fighting to get what she deserved, as she had done her entire life, she calmly accepted my lies and excuses.

She claimed that she loved me, despite having too much youthful exuberance to trip over love. Falling in love, as so many dream about and strive for, should really only came as a final plunge at life, not a first stab at happiness.

 

e celebrated her seventeenth birthday exactly six months after our wedding. For the occasion, I purchased a ten dollar plastic bottle of gold tequila.

“Oh, Isaac, you know I don’t drink, especially before work,” she said, smiling anyway. I figured she appreciated it, and convinced myself of such, choosing to ignore the lingering suspicion she had begun playing the same games with me as she played with her customers.

As I looked at her tender and innocent face, a face unlike most hookers, I said, “I need it for when you leave.” Then again, I needed it when she stayed home. I didn’t have anything to offer her, which didn’t bother me. It bothered me that she offered so much of herself to me; I realized these constant offerings had started to drain her exuberance.

“Then why buy it for me?”

“Because it shows you how much I need you. I don’t enjoy drinking, Kayla, but I don’t enjoy anything when you leave.”

“We need me to work, so we can keep living.”

“Are we really living?” I said as I gestured at the squalor, the white trash existence, around me. “A trailer in the Nevada desert, a half-mile from your House and sixty miles from everywhere else? We have no friends, no social life, nothing besides sex.”

“We have our love,” She said as she leaned into me, kissed me deeply, and smiled without pulling away. “I don’t want anything else.”

She had chosen to become The Senorita for the night, a persona she had started to choose more regularly as a way to attract new clients from a pool of primarily Hispanic migrant workers. She tinted her eyes to an oil-slick black, blushed her cheeks dark, and spoke in an almost convincing Spanglish accent.

Regardless of her persona, the whore within her had started to become more common in our relationship. I found that she almost feared my touch, and that she tried to keep our conversations shallow and efficient.

“Do you really love me?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because you have a way with every customer…”

“You’re not a customer, remember? You’re my life. Everything I do happens because I want to please you. I want to keep you satisfied.”

“So you really do love me?”

“We have a rule in the House—no holding allowed. Every customer has a wham-bam, and we allow conversation, but no holding. It’s too personal.” She turned away, and leaned against me. “I want you to hold me, Isaac.”

 

t happened after the illegals left for the winter and the regular truckers had quit asking for her. In leaving her, her former regular customers said she lacked her initial magic, and they wanted something new and exciting.

To compensate she began accepting anybody, even the ones who just wanted to play pool and tell dirty jokes. She also took the really kinky ones, because we needed the money, and this got her into trouble.

“They like my ass,” she said. “So I have to bend over for some of them.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” I said as I poured myself another tequila shot.

“But I do, because you won’t.”

“What can I do? I tried to work, but…”

“I know, your back hurt.” She leaned and kissed my forehead. “I don’t want you in pain, Isaac. I love you, remember? I don’t care what happens with you. I love you and I won’t ever leave you.”

She left in high spirits, only to return before I had even gotten suitably drunk. Outside, the rain poured steadily, which made her hair stick to her face. She shut the door and took away the tequila.

“What can we do when my body gives out?”

“Hopefully retire, and travel the country,” I said. “Remember how you wanted to ride the rails?”

“What if we’ve only got a few pennies to our name?”

“We’ll have plenty, Kayla. You’ll retire, and we’ll travel everywhere together.”

“What if we can’t?”

“Just because I don’t pimp you anymore doesn’t mean I can’t manage you. That’s why we married in the first place, so we could manage each other’s lives, remember?”

“I married you because I loved you,” she said.

“You married me because you thought I could take you places. Together, we still can take each other places. We can ride the rails, and share a sleeper car every night, just like lovers in the movies.”

“And our days?”

“We’ll hold each other on the diner car, on the viewing car, even on the caboose, as we climb over mountains and crawl across plains. We’ll see it all, just you and me.”

She fell silent for a few moments, and we enjoyed the pounding of the rain on the roof. Finally, she spoke.

“I’ve got AIDS.”

I quit breathing, and considered permanently stopping. Everything. Finally, I relented and inhaled, barely audible over the firecracker snaps of the rain that spattered on the roof.

“If we have children, they could even ride free,” I said. “They’d love a train, just like I did.”

“It means I can’t work anymore. The House Mother told me tonight when I came in.”

“We could even get a year-round pass, and never have to leave the safety of the train.”

“I don’t know how it happened. Professionals take too many precautions to get in trouble, you know? That’s the main reason I work at a House, right?”

“I hear the steel country, up north around the Great Lakes, looks really great from the viewing car.”

“It must have happened with one of the trucker’s who likes my ass. I can’t always tell if they stay protected in that position. I thought I knew, but …”

I stood up and opened the door, the water splashing up at me. “I like riding in the rain, as well. It’s very romantic.”

“Isaac, I love you. We can make it together…”

I walked into the desert rain and lost her voice in the storm. For nearly three hours, I walked straight (in a line). She never chased me, not even to the doorway. I figured her final strands of innocence had her convinced that life could not turn sour, even when it had spoiled.

 

II

I first rode the rails just after my thirteenth birthday, in the dead of winter. My father, a steel man by trade who couldn’t hold a job, beat my mother one night after he’d drank too much. Then he dragged me from the house to the freight yard, where he pulled me into a northbound boxcar. He said later that he brought me as a hostage to keep the cops from bothering him, although I felt confident that he really loved me and feared losing me.

He blamed his arthritis—which he claimed had developed from walking across the frozen tundra of Michigan to pour molten steel—for his failures to keep a job. Others blamed the alcohol.

I blamed myself. The arthritis hit right after I came along. Until he stole me to the freight trains, I refused to admit that he drank excessively, ignored my mother’s claims that he always came home drunk, and attributed his pervasive scent of whiskey to the steel mill.

I never had a full middle name, only A for an initial because my parents didn’t see a need for a full middle name. On my birth certificate, they just put “A” because it happened to be the first letter.

I figured that it meant arthritis. Isaac Arthritis Oppelly. A fitting tribute to a father who never wanted me to forget him. A perfect name to remind me of a perfect life.

My guilt created great tension between my dad and me; we seldom got along. Except when we talked about the line, the rail, the steam horse...anyway we looked at it, the train always stayed a train. The trains, despite sleet, snow, or dead cattle, never failed to arrive, and that fact alone fueled our conviction that life would work out as we had planned, regardless of our failures or inadequacies.

When I turned fifteen, I ran away from him. I’d ridden the rails for almost two years with my dad, despite his attempts to shake me. A few times, he just told me to leave, while other times he tried to physically ditch me, an impossible task for an old, hobbled man.

So he kept me, until I decided to leave him. I hopped a freight south from Chicago, riding it all the way to California without getting caught. Almost my entire life, I never got caught, thanks primarily to the lessons my dad taught me.

“Stay quiet, stay humble, know your place,” he’d say. “You understand we’re stealing a ride from them, right? So behave like it. Act casual, don’t make a scene. Ignore the drunk bums who harass you. Just look at them stern, and they won’t challenge you.”

After arriving in California, I found a beach, a job, and some friends. I’d spend my days stocking groceries, and nights running wild on the sand along the ocean.

I didn’t ride the rails again until I left Kayla two decades later. And I never saw my father again.

 

III

I huddled in the back of the freight car, ignoring the drunk faggots on the other side of the car. I didn’t remember seeing faggots as a kid, back when the outlook on love laid out simple. Now, love had so many different definitions, and common sense no longer qualified. Love meant compassion and defying society’s odds.

The cold gripped me tighter, and I began to question my leaving Kayla. Given, we couldn’t last if one of us slowly faded away, but I’d made such a hasty decision. I could return, not even a week had passed, God did I want to return...my body ached for Kayla...or even my dad, anyone who might comfort me and fill me with the magic of innocence. I needed the warmth of hope they offered.

I guess that’s what made me stay with both my dad and Kayla so long. They had mastered the illusion of optimism. Kayla’s optimism had a contagious quality, something which seeped into everyone around her even when she attempted to hoard it for herself. My dad, however, applied all of his optimism towards me.

“You’ll do well, Isaac. You won’t fail the ones who love you, like I’ve done,” he’d said numerous times. Even thinking about those nights when he’d curl around me, surrounding my body with his blanket and jacket, warmed me a little.

“I can’t ask you to forgive how I’ve acted in my life, Isaac. I only want you to know that I care, and that I love you.”

Yet the next day I’d see him hobble away, using our final pennies for cheap whiskey and a hooker. His promises, so comforting in the dark cold, continually spoiled under the glare of sunlight and reality.

The faggots finished, and when one of them approached me I quit thinking about my dad and retrieved a switchblade from my bag.

“Who’d you lose?” He stood nearly six feet tall, and had a full beard littered with his lover’s cum.

“Stay away from me, queer boy,” I said sternly.

“I’m not hitting on you. I just don’t want you to get lonely.”

“I’m not lonely, ass maggot.”

He sat down next to me, and openly I fingered my knife.

“You don’t seem to appreciate love much. It takes great sacrifice, you know.”

“You’ve got cum in your beard,” I said.

He rubbed his beard, licked his hand, then continued, “Your abuse doesn’t phase me. I helped build these rails, and these rails helped build this country. Then I got booted, because my boss caught me with his son. I’m as American as the Founding Fathers, yet I’ve been relegated to the same standing as a sewer rat because I’m a blue-collar homosexual. They call me useless, and a waste, then travel along the Great American Railroad System, the same one these faggot hands helped build. So your piss-ant fears don’t concern me. What concerns me is that you don’t understand the essentials, like love.”

“How do you know what I don’t understand?”

“Because if you understood love, you’d understand us. It’s not that you haven’t been in love, or had somebody love you. If that was the case, you’d actually envy us, because of your romantic illusions of love. If you had experienced love and appreciated it, you wouldn’t envy us but would tolerate us because you’d understand what love required. You simply don’t understand love, and therefore despise anyone who happens to love. I would guess that most of that anger probably gets aimed at the people who truly love you.”

“Listen, dick lips, I don’t need your...”

“I don’t have anything to give you anyway. You don’t want my lectures or my sickening presence, and that’s all I can offer. What you need is to realize your worth and accept love next time somebody offers it to you.”

 

IV

Americans throw away something like a billion pennies a year. If only I could gather even one percent of those “worthless” coins, I’d be rich, at least for a little while.

Except I did nothing but cast away penny after penny, not considering the tiny, innate value of each. Because of this, my heart and soul eventually fell upon impoverished times.

I never realized the value of a penny until time had deserted me. After leaving Kayla, I rode the rails for nearly three years without getting caught, until one warm night somewhere in Missouri, two cops threw me out of a freight car, beat me severely, then left me for dead.

At that moment, it became apparent to me that the world classified me, just like I’d classified the hookers, drunks, and faggots that had passed through my life, as a penny. The police didn’t even consider me valuable enough to lock up, so they left me to die slowly. Who cares about a penny lost?

As I lay bleeding on the dirt and coal beside the tracks, I finally felt equal to every penny I’d known and, more important, capable of loving each of them. I decided to start with Kayla.

So I returned to Nevada, though I chose to hitchhike. Unlike my dad or the bearded faggot, I didn’t deserve the rails.

It took almost two weeks to hitchhike to our trailer, and when I arrived I found it deserted. I pushed the tumbleweeds which had piled against the door aside, then kicked it open.

Inside I discovered everything the same as when I’d left three years before. My half-empty bottle of Tequila still sat open on the counter, Kayla’s lingerie still hung in the closet, and our jar of change still hid behind the kitchen window’s curtain. When I retrieved it, however, I found that she had emptied it of everything except a few stray coins, all pennies, which had stuck to the bottom of the former jelly jar.

Sitting on the pull-down table was a note, covered with dust. I couldn’t read the words, mostly, as the ink had faded. The only legible writing was under the two shot glasses Kayla had used to anchor the bottom of the note, and those words read:

This may not be the best choice, but
something needs to work out for me.
I just know it can. Love, Kayla

After unsuccessfully studying the faded ink for any hints to her destination, I used a butter knife to scrape the three pennies from the change jar. Then, as a show of respect that I now felt pennies deserved, I folded the note twice around them, jammed them into my pocket, and began my search for Kayla.

I never discovered what happened to her after I left. The Mother said she’d traveled west, like so many dreamers before her. Beyond that, nobody knew what had happened, not even if she’d made it to anywhere alive.

I needed to find her, if only to apologize. She was the only penny I knew, besides my now dead father, who might accept my apology. If only I could find her, then maybe things could begin to work out.

So I hit the road, hoping to catch a worthless penny. Yet even her life, one of so little value, had more potential than my voided existence.

It felt good, really, my new pursuit. I felt like a school kid, drooling over the possibilities of a full-time job and a girl’s tits. Once again, I found myself intoxicated by her innocence as I followed the path of every penny before me, a path of failed dreams and harrowing realities.

 

[END]

© 2004 Josh Loftin - Contributor's Bio

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